AI weekly roundup · 2026-W40

AMD announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the spatial intelligence company founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at about $8.2 billion. The deal has not closed. It is expected to complete by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions; after closing, Fei-Fei Li will become AMD's Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su.

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol, saying it delivers near-GPT-6-Astra intelligence for coding, computer use and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's standard API input and output token prices. GitHub Copilot, Amazon Bedrock and Codex CLI added it the same day.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family, at the same list price as Sonnet 5: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Anthropic says its output is more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and that, in its own testing, the cost per task is up to 30% lower (mainly because it needs fewer tokens to do the same work). The model is available on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

OpenAI introduced dots, describing them as proactive assistants that can keep working across complex projects and everyday tasks while users stay in control. Details such as who can use them and the underlying model come only from press reports, so the site marks them unconfirmed.

Shopify has added WebMCP tools to its checkout flow. AI agents in the browser can read and update the current checkout and, once the buyer confirms, submit the order. When buyer input is needed, such as 3D Secure verification, or when a blocking UI extension appears, the tools hand control back to the buyer; merchants need no extra configuration.

Google's Help Center says Gems in the Gemini app will be transitioned to skills starting in November 2026: November 2026 for personal accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business, enterprise and nonprofit accounts, and June 2027 for education accounts. When Gems are removed, Google will automatically recreate existing Gems as skills.

NVIDIA released Kumo Tabular, an open foundation model for tabular classification and regression that predicts in a single forward pass, with no training, tuning or feature engineering. It comes in three sizes from 28M to 215M parameters under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, which permits commercial use.

NVIDIA announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, made up of the open-source OpenShell runtime and the Sentry reference system design, which constrains AI agents with software boundaries and hardware monitoring. NVIDIA says Sentry, running on BlueField-4 DPUs, can isolate an agent that crosses its boundaries within milliseconds; the platform software, including OpenShell and skills, is available from NVIDIA's developer resources page and GitHub.